America’s wealthiest colleges saw their endowments grow in fiscal 2024, with strong investment returns more than making up for a decline in gifts at a few of the schools in the wake of pro-Palestinian campus protests. Those protests upset some billionaire donors and led to hostile Congressional hearings and the resignations of the presidents of Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
So far, six of the eight Ivy League schools have released figures on the performance of their endowments in fiscal 2024, ended June 30, with returns ranging from a low of 7.1% at Penn to a high of 11.5% at Columbia. Those two schools and Harvard are the only ones that have published complete financial reports, including new gifts to their endowments.
Most dramatically, gifts to Harvard’s endowment fell 35% to $367 million in 2024 from $567 million in 2023. Yet the value of the endowment still grew to $53.2 billion from $50.7 billion, after two years of decline—a reflection of a 9.6% return on investments for 2024, compared to 2.9% in 2023 and a 1.8% loss in 2022.
While endowment giving, which is heavily dependent on the richest Americans, does tend to fluctuate from year to year, Harvard President Alan Garber has expressed concern both privately and in an interview with the Harvard Crimson about the recent decline.
By contrast, gifts to Harvard for its current use, which primarily come from foundations and small alumni donors—75% averaged $150—actually grew 9% to $528 million. Like other wealthy schools, Harvard relies heavily on current gifts, in addition to distributions from its endowment fund; together, they amounted to 45% of Harvard’s 2024 revenue.
Columbia not only posted the best investment performance of those Ivy League schools reporting so far, but also reported gifts to its endowment actually rose to $291 million from $195 million. Yet a worrying sign for Columbia came just this month, when it held its annual giving day (a 24-hour online event) on October 1 and raised just $21.4 million from 13,870 donors. In 2022, the university’s giving day raised $30 million—a record sum after 11 years of increases—from 19,229 donors. Last year’s annual giving day, which had been scheduled for late October, was canceled after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Israel began a bombing campaign in response, and protests broke out on Columbia’s New York City campus.
Despite threats by high-profile donors such as Stone Ridge Asset Management CEO Ross Stevens and AQR Capital Management’s Cliff Asness to withhold donations to the university, gifts to Penn’s endowment were down just 1%—from $219 million in 2023 to $216 million in 2024. Meanwhile, its endowment returned 7% and ended the year with a value of $22.3 billion, up from $21 billion in fiscal 2023.
The endowments all underperformed compared to the S&P 500 stock index, which returned 22.7% in the year ended June 30th. But that’s because they have a different mix of assets designed to shield them from the swings in the public markets and produce a healthy long term return with less risk. Harvard, for example, had just 14% of its endowment in public equities at the end of fiscal 2024, compared to 32% in hedge funds and 39% in private equity. It had 5% in real estate and 5% in bonds and TIPS, the government bonds designed to protect against inflation.
“For elite private universities, endowment performance has improved year-over-year, driven partially by strong performance in the equity markets, but largely through the outperformance of hedge fund and alternative investments (in which these universities are heavily weighted),” Christopher Good, managing director of higher education and nonprofit finance at RBC Capital Markets, said in an email. As these universities’ endowments have grown larger, they’ve turned toward alternative investments to both “invest at scale and benefit from the outsized returns of hedge funds and private equity strategies,” he added.
Brown University posted an 11.3% return in fiscal 2024, with its endowment ending the year at $7.2 billion, up from $6.6 billion at the end of fiscal 2023. Cornell University reported an 8.7% return and an endowment value of $10.7 billion, up from $10 billion in fiscal 2023. Dartmouth’s endowment returned 8.4% and ended the year at $8.3 billion. Princeton University and Yale University have yet to release information on fiscal 2024 returns.
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